“What is freedom? It is the right to choose one’s own employment. Certainly it means that, if it means anything,” thundered Frederick Douglass.

Is forced labor on behalf of the federal government slavery? Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg obviously doesn't think so. Fretting to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow about what he sees as the country's lack of "social cohesion," he called for one year of national service as a solution. No doubt he would take offense at any comparison of his scheme to chattel slavery—a comparison such as that offered by former slave Frederick Douglass.

"What is freedom? It is the right to choose one's own employment. Certainly it means that, if it means anything," Douglass thundered in response to Union General Nathaniel P. Banks's policy as military commander of Louisiana of extracting one year of forced agricultural labor from freedmen on behalf of the federal government. "And when any individual or combination of individuals, undertakes to decide for any man when he shall work, where he shall work, at what he shall work, and for what he shall work, he or they practically reduce him to slavery."

Frederick Douglass, who had personal experience of the horrors of slavery, knew how the institution differs from temporary forced national service—and yet he directly compared them and objected to both.

Strictly speaking, the 37-year-old Buttigieg didn't explicitly call for conscription to build "social cohesion." He allowed himself a little deniability by telling Maddow, "One thing we could do that would change that would be to make it, if not legally obligatory, but certainly a social norm that anybody, after they're 18, spends a year in national service."

Does that mean Buttigieg wants a draft or not? It sounds like he wants 18 year-olds to just load themselves on the buses without the muss and fuss of an enforcement mechanism—but he'll consider some arm-twisting if focus groups voice enthusiasm for the idea.

That enthusiasm may not be forthcoming. A 2017 survey by Gallup found 49 percent of Americans favoring the idea and 45 percent opposed. Unsurprisingly, support for mandatory national service rises among older cohorts who are highly unlikely to ever receive a draft notice, winning the nod from a solid two-thirds of those over 65. By contrast, the 18- to 29-year-olds actually targeted by forced labor schemes despise the idea by 57 percent to 39 percent.

Buttigieg seems to think that allowing a choice of civilian or military tasks to fulfill the whims of politicians addresses concerns about mandatory national service. But for many people it's the "mandatory" part that poses the problem.

After General William Westmoreland objected that he did not want to command "an army of mercenaries" as he characterized paid volunteers when he and Milton Friedman famously sparred (PDF) over ending the draft during the Vietnam War, Friedman riposted, "would you rather command an army of slaves?"

Friedman's effort to end the military draft was supported by economist Walter Oi, who argued on dollars-and-cents grounds but had personal experience with the evils of compulsion. At the age of 13, he'd been scooped up by the United States government and forced into an internment camp with roughly 120,000 other Japanese-Americans. "He had some pretty strong feelings about his imprisonment," David R. Henderson, who knew Oi, wrote after the man's death in 2013.

The roughly four million former slaves freed, as Frederick Douglass had already freed himself, from forced labor by the Civil War undoubtedly had "pretty strong feelings" about their former status (even as the freedom they gained remained incomplete). Describing slavery as "robbing the laborer of the hard earned results of his patient industry," Frederick Douglass went on to tell his former master, in an 1855 letter, "In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living. Your faculties remained yours, and mine became useful to their rightful owner."

While their bondage was nominally limited in duration, such sentiments would have been recognized by American sailors snatched by British press gangs leading to and triggering the War of 1812. While 9,991 Americans formally protested their conscription by British ships, perhaps 20,000 Americans were forced into service overall, making the practice the first-cited grievance by President James Madison when calling for war against Britain. Impressment was no more popular with Britons—Admiral Horatio Nelson estimated that 40,000 sailors deserted the conscription-dependent Royal Navy between 1793 and 1801.

Later, the U.S. military had its own problems with unwilling conscripts (as well as regretful enlistees). Over 420,000 soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen deserted between 1966 and 1972, during the Vietnam War.

Forcibly extracting labor from the unwilling has a long history in this country, as does resistance to the same.

If forcing people to do labor that they wouldn't do of their own accord is nothing new, neither is Buttigieg's social-engineering grandiosity in pronouncing national service a boon to "social cohesion." Such force-'em-for-their-own-good sentiments echo a 1967 Selective Service document that pronounced even the mere requirement of draft registration as a goad to "more effective human beings."

But if history is any example, the only cohesion to be found will be that of shared resentment. And if the conscripts become more effective at anything, it will likely be defiance and escape.

It's odd how a country with a miserable history of forced labor and two wars fought over the issue keeps revisiting the idea as if it's a newly minted work of genius. But here we are, with Pete Buttigieg joining a long and disreputable list of pundits and public officials in polishing off this ancient policy turd and passing it off as a solution to what supposedly ails America.

Maybe Buttigieg and his ilk will decide that he never meant the idea of national service to be mandatory at all—or, at least, that it's a good idea to distance themselves from the idea of extracting forced labor from the unwilling. Younger Americans will be able to relax again, at least for a while. And the rest of us will rejoice that decency has prevailed a little longer. The spirit of Frederick Douglass would likely join the celebration.

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But, but, but, BUTT HEAD said he was all for Freedom & Liberty when he launched his campaign! I wonder what him & hubby think about Govt. FORCING Christian bakers who do not want to bake them an anniversary cake to make said cake?

Usually, when a politician starts talking about “social cohesion,” it indicates that they don’t really have a damn clue as to how that is created. Nice to see that Buttigieg isn’t breaking that streak.

He’s obviously thinking back to the New Deal government make-work programs like the CCC, PWA, and WPA, but people didn’t join those organizations out of a sense of social solidarity, they did it because they were desperate for work to feed themselves and their families. They were paid comparatively shit wages (about $6000 a year in inflation-adjusted terms), lived in tents and tarpaper-covered shacks, worked with almost no safety regulations at all, and most of their money was sent home.

Try to get the average college student today to get within shouting distance of that work environment, and they’d desert within a week.

I love the word ‘ilk’. It conjures up just the right amount of creepiness that needs to be associated with such nonsense.

How would Butthead propose to pay for such a program, because I can tell you right now that such a program would not generate positive cashflow. Unless, of course, you are going to rent out this conscripted workforce to the highest bidder. Which would be an interesting way to get white folks picking lettuce and eliminate the need for immigrants to do ‘those jobs’.

Paying for it is only the half of it. How would he ensure that these work camps where the prols got lots of fresh air and hard work were not just rape camps? How would you ever keep the criminal element under control in such an environment?

I assumed, of course, that rape camps were the intended outcome. Once you do away with the notion of consent being necessary before requiring a person’s involvement in work activities, doing away with the necessity for consent in sexual activities isn’t far behind.

Private payrolls grew by 275,000 last month, the biggest increase since July, when they expanded by 284,000. Services-providing jobs increased by 223,000 in April, led by a gain of 59,000 jobs in professional and business services.

When you get down to it, this creepy little bastard, and my God is creepy, is offended by this and wants to ensure as many people as possible are dependent upon the government and under his creepy little thumb as possible. That is all “social cohesion” means; under the control of creepy fucks like Buttigieg.

Yeah – should be more like “the unexpectedly good numbers just show that the foundation laid by Obama is so strong that despite the expectations of some of the world’s leading economists, even Trump has been unable to sabotage it.”

“Not parody at all.” Hard telling. He did let the mask fall once about 6 months ago and posted a direct repeat of a commie-kid comment (remember him?); more than a little suspicious. I’m thinking it might be less parody and more simple trolling.

That is a good description of him. He just makes my skin crawl. As evil as she is, I would rather have to put up it Harris as President. Seeing her on the news every day would enrage me but it wouldn’t be as unpleasent as seeing Buttigieg every day.

Assuming lack of “social cohesion” really is a problem, it can best be remedied by a Koch / Reason open borders immigration policy. The more diverse our country becomes — the more religions we follow, the more languages we speak — the stronger the bonds between us.

I realize this sounds counterintuitive, but scientific research confirms it.

While the majority of Venezuelans suffer, Maduro dines at luxurious restaurants and treats his family to extravagant skydiving adventures. The president’s corrupt behavior is a reflection of his inner circle, which is composed almost entirely of crooks. To name a few, Diosdado Cabello, Chavismo’s second in command, who served as president of the Constituent Assembly under Maduro, is the head of an international drug-trafficking organization known as the Cártel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), along with Néstor Reverol, minister of the interior and justice. Maduro’s nephews, known in the media as the narco sobrinos, are imprisoned in the United States for their involvement in the same drug trade. Meanwhile, Maduro’s former vice president, Tareck El Aissami, now Minister of Industries and National Production, has effectively acted as an ambassador to the terrorist organization Hezbollah, inviting its militants to train with FARC rebel forces in Venezuela. These are just some of the people who have led the country into chaos and who have dutifully followed Maduro while the rest of the country suffers under starvation, looting, illness, and extreme poverty.

Wait a minute Maduro is doing this for the people.. all socialist/communist corruption is for the good of the people. Mayor Pete knows this and also knows the proletariat is mindless and vote for because he is a clean, articulate white married gay guy that checks a lot of boxes … But he is dangerous

One of the things that drives me crazy about the people who want to bring back the draft is their complete ignorance of how brutal a draft military has to be. With a volunteer force, the threat of kicking someone out is a real deterent and means of maintaining dicipline. But if everyone there or most are drafted, they want to get out. So, the threat of kicking them out doesn’t work. If we had a draft the military would have to go back to punishments like forced labor and bread in water and things like that to maintain dicipline. The people who want a draft have no clue what that means.

Of course if this creep ever got his way, we would have a civilian “service corps” that had to do the same thing. I wish someone would ask him how he would handle people who refused to do this or refused to work once they got there.

But if everyone there or most are drafted, they want to get out. So, the threat of kicking them out doesn’t work. If we had a draft the military would have to go back to punishments like forced labor and bread in water and things like that to maintain dicipline. The people who want a draft have no clue what that means.

Corporal punishment or foolish military adventurism… whatever thins the ranks.

But if everyone there or most are drafted, they want to get out. So, the threat of kicking them out doesn’t work.

My father-in-law’s story is instructive that way. He was drafted, and they tried to make him an MP, but he kept screwing things up on purpose to make sure they took that job away from him. Then they sent him to Vietnam as a sniper, but he never shot anybody. He would just sit in a tree and listen to music on headphones. Then they put him in the general infantry, where he would refuse to carry a gun or to follow much of any orders.

When they would threaten to discipline him he would say “what are going to do, send me to Vietnam?”

What they can do is shoot him. And that happened more than the country likes to admit. The draft creates a brutal military and is something that should only be resorted to in the most dire of emergencies.

Honestly, I think modern weapons have gotten so lethal that we will never be able to use giant armies again and the draft will likely never be necessary.

Yeah, that unit cohesion can be a bitch during a draft. Had a friend one time whose guard unit got an all expense paid tour of southeast Asia. They had a guy like that, kept screwing up, and in ways that endangered the whole squad. One patrol my friend figured out that the several weeks of training had pretty much been telling him any problem can be solved with an M-16. So next patrol when there was a shot heard, and everyone was flat on the ground, he shot the fuck up in the leg.

Meh – I think it’s considerably more venal than that. My own Boomer father is quite anti-commie, and thinks the US was 100% in the right in Vietnam, but did whatever he could to avoid getting drafted in the ’60s. By the time of Gulf I, he was unironically arguing for conscription to fight off the global threat of Sadam Hussein. I pointed out his hypocrisy, but I don’t think he heard me.

Are we at the point where there are more candidates on the left who’ve proposed forced labor social cohesion camps than haven’t?

Since both parties are equally evil and stupid where’s the GOP’s answer to these calls for concentration/conversion camps? Seeing the Democrats plunge ahead in such endeavors undaunted, I’m even more disappointed in Trump’s abject failure to deliver on his promises of cattle cars and concentration camps.

Since both parties are equally evil and stupid where’s the GOP’s answer to these calls for concentration/conversion camps? Seeing the Democrats plunge ahead in such endeavors undaunted, I’m even more disappointed in Trump’s abject failure to deliver on his promises of cattle cars and concentration camps.

I’ve seriously seen comments from Trump supporters which go like, “I hate the Chicoms, but they’re doing great things to the Uighurs.”

Sounds like Americorp. And the idea is to give young people an alternate route towards service than the military. If voluntary and paid for by redirecting $ from Labor, Education, HHS, etc, then why not?

“Sounds like Americorp. And the idea is to give young people an alternate route towards service than the military. If voluntary and paid for by redirecting $ from Labor, Education, HHS, etc, then why not?”

Well there are a few problems here. First and most glaring is why in the fuckity fuck is digging ditches in a national park providing better “service” than getting a paying job as a nurse or software engineer? There is nothing about a government labor camp that provides better service to society at large than an actual job would. After all people are willingly paying you to do that stuff unlike these labor camps.

That leads to the second problem. Instead of me voluntarily paying one of these young people for things I want like medical service or perfectly cooked french fries I am being forced to pay for shit I don’t want like painting the walls at the Che Guevara Heroism Memorial museum or whatever they would be using my money for.

Society expresses what is of service by willingly offering money to do things they find valuable. This is paying people and wasting resources on shit nobody wants and using force to either collect the resources to pay for it or force to get people to work or both.

Why limit it to people who haven’t served in the military? Why limit the duration at all. Just think of the public works that could be accomplished if you could pull anyone, anywhere, at anytime – to serve the public, of course.

“Sotomayor said, “I believe in forced labor,” and. “If I had my way, I would make pro bono service a requirement.””

“Unsurprisingly, support for mandatory national service rises among older cohorts who are highly unlikely to ever receive a draft notice, winning the nod from a solid two-thirds of those over 65. By contrast, the 18-29 year-olds actually targeted by forced labor schemes despise the idea by 57 percent to 39 percent.”

Curiously, the patterns seems reversed when it comes to socialism – aka stealing from business (and worse). Young people like the idea, older people – maybe because they’re more likely to have stuff worth stealing – are more likely to be against it.

Every one of these sorts of policies will not be coerced. We will just somehow get everyone to agree with us that this is important, in a society where we supposedly are severely lacking in social cohesion. Wait, how does that work?

Young people should give up a year of their lives, medical professionals should just accept that they should be paid less without changing how they work. People on a UBI will volunteer more. Everybody will do what we want them to, because that is how people work.

Sorry it took me so long to comment on this article. I returned to my apartment about an hour ago. It turns out that an involuntary psychiatric patient can be released from the county hospital without signing the discharge papers if the treating psychiatrist is so against providing her services to him that she calls security to escort me off the hospital grounds.

Anyway … yeah, forced economic relationships are a bad idea, but they are the core of the Democratic Party’s platform these days.

It’s odd how a country with a miserable history of forced labor and two wars fought over the issue keeps revisiting the idea as if it’s a newly minted work of genius.

Maybe that’s because the kernel of the idea is why this country was FOUNDED. We were not founded as a place where individuals would build a nest in the wilderness in order to become self-reliant hermits. We were founded on the notion that any society/community worth a shit would also have to find a way to make itself successful by leveraging the freely-chosen talents of individuals. From Franklin’s Junto to the militia to the FreeMasons to Toqueville’s ‘civic associations’ to yes even the way that our citizen-soldiers put Europe back together after Europe obliterated itself.

There is nothing ‘easy’ at all about this. All of our attempts to ‘make it happen’ rather than help to ‘let it happen’ have been utter failures. And among a people who have now become stupid as dirt, it’s no surprise that only those who offer something that stupid people can understand now voice their idea of the ‘choice’ in front of us – become a bunch of individualist hermits or coerce ourselves into a ‘mass’.

Congrats Tuccille. You have now joined the utterly worthless looking for easy tropes/cliches.

Apparently, it wasn’t good enough that Steve Rogers volunteered to join the Army and for the Super Soldier program. JFree thinks that unless he signs the Sokovia accords, his service isn’t really on behalf of the world, just for himself and his friends.

‘Voluntary association’ is the rainbows and unicorns of libertarianism. Buttigeg’s comment (mandatory or social norm) opened the door to what COULD HAVE BEEN an actual article about how voluntary association can be made the basis for community/national (define your level) service. How it used to work in this country – how it died – how it can work BETTER than mandatory. Hell anything. Maybe he could have even influenced a pol to change his own proposal in a libertarian direction while it’s still half-baked.

Tuccille chose instead to overtly distort what the pol said (and admit that he distorted it). In order to do some libertarian virtue-signalling and fling poo at his straw man. Demonstrating once again why libertarians seem to have nothing to offer but ‘get off my lawn’.

Those aren’t my words. They are Tucille’s. Who then proceeds to build an entire article around the assumption that he did explicitly call for conscription (if not outright chattel slavery). It’s dishonest and contemptible. Esp since he also then completely wastes any opportunity to do anything but yap on about the irrelevant and fling poo around. Which isn’t really a surprise since that seems to be the sum total of libertarianism in these parts.

JFree May.1.2019 at 10:10 pm “Strictly speaking, the 37-year-old Buttigieg didn’t explicitly call for conscription” “Those aren’t my words. They are Tucille’s. Who then proceeds to build an entire article around the assumption that he did explicitly call for conscription (if not outright chattel slavery).”

Either the English language is a mystery to you, or you’re an outright liar. Or both. No, Tucille did not build an article around the assumption that the lefty twit *explicitly* called for conscription. The lefty twit gave himself an ‘out’ by never doing so, but by *implicitly* calling for conscription. You might try an ESL course…

…social-engineering grandiosity in pronouncing national service a boon to “social cohesion.”

More for Biden to dissemble. Seriously, at what point does the Democrat Party reign in these unbounded candidates with their rampant wish lists of anything and everything that pops up among the chattering class of social media? Or [as I hope] are they going to careen headlong into an actual political race with these memes?

Wrong. Mr. Buttpig’s plan for forced labor is long overdue. Forced labor worked wonders in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Just think of the wonders it will do here in America. Quit being so negative.

Social cohesion is a term invented by focus groups paid by Butt’s campaign managers. It is useful because it is so far unique among the Dem candidates, and has a progressive communitarian sound that may garner votes among the 18-37 yo Dem/Independent crossover demographic.

J.D., when you wrote this statement, it should have been a big red flag to you that you were about to embark on some intellectually dishonest bullshit.

Your Godwinning here is cute and all, but maybe instead of making hysterical comparisons to slavery and internment camps, you could have spent a few minutes looking at modern examples of national service to see whether they work more or less well.

“Your Godwinning here is cute and all, but maybe instead of making hysterical comparisons to slavery and internment camps, you could have spent a few minutes looking at modern examples of national service to see whether they work more or less well.”

You fucking ignoramus, whether they ‘work’ or not is irrelevant; they are slavery. Fuck off you pathetic piece of shit.

Slavery worked very, very well. Ask any plantation owner. It worked so well that the South seceded to preserve it.

Of course productivity was minuscule, free blacks in the North were far more productive. The overall standard of living was well below that of the North. The culture that supported the idea of racial hierarchies was utterly depraved. Arguments were settled with pistols (or swords) at dawn.

“Worked” is a non-concept since the criteria for “working” always goes unnamed. That’s because if the criteria were made public the public would storm the plantation with torches and pitchforks. The real criteria is always “I get to tell everyone else where to work, how to work, when to work, what work to do and where to send the product of their work”.

Mayor Pete doesn’t have to send armed thugs to kidnap people into his social service press gangs. All he has to do is deny driver’s licenses to those unwilling to serve. Maybe a hit to your credit report for good measure. Want to buy a gun? Not if you don’t serve. Maybe no in state tuition at any college accepting federal funds.

There are plenty of ways to get you to “volunteer”. Mayor Pete knows them all.

I think it is a fine idea balanced against “free stuff” – such as college, etc. You take free stuff; you work off at least some of the cost. If you pay your way, you don’t have to. Fact is, Americans are shitty, lazy citizens/sheep, so he’s dead on in that respect.

[…] to slice it up. The USSA seems a more appropriate acronym to use when democrats discuss ideas. As Reason so aptly put it: no doubt he would take offense at any comparison of his scheme to chattel slavery—a comparison […]

[…] to slice it up. The USSA seems a more appropriate acronym to use when democrats discuss ideas. As Reason so aptly put it: no doubt he would take offense at any comparison of his scheme to chattel slavery—a comparison […]

[…] to slice it up. The USSA seems a more appropriate acronym to use when democrats discuss ideas. As Reason so aptly put it: no doubt he would take offense at any comparison of his scheme to chattel slavery—a comparison […]

[…] to slice it up. The USSA seems a more appropriate acronym to use when democrats discuss ideas. As Reason so aptly put it: no doubt he would take offense at any comparison of his scheme to chattel slavery—a comparison […]

[…] to slice it up. The USSA seems a more appropriate acronym to use when democrats discuss ideas. As Reason so aptly put it: no doubt he would take offense at any comparison of his scheme to chattel slavery—a comparison […]

[…] Finally, time banking and social credit can encourage volunteer work without force. The government will not force people to volunteer as presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg (D-Indiana) proposes. […]

[…] like this plan because it encourages volunteering without coercion like Pete Buttigieg (D-Indiana) proposes. Moreover, rewards points work, I often shop at Kroger and Safeway Stores to collect them. Thus, […]

[…] like this plan because it encourages volunteering without coercion like Pete Buttigieg (D-Indiana) proposes. Moreover, rewards points work, I often shop at Kroger and Safeway Stores to collect them. Thus, […]